Macroblog

About Me

Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

March 19, 2009

Links from the Week

I'm just rolling in from an open jaw that took me from Austin to Boston and back. (I went to SXSW to moderate a panel and read from my book, then to the Berkman Center for a talk. More on these later.) What did I miss? To judge by my tweetdeck alerts, quite a lot. Here are some highlights, in no particular order:

Crowdsourcing SchadenfreudeA few days after sitting on my SXSW panel the Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang published an unfortunate post about Mzinga, one of the companies he follows. Within he reported that he'd been hearing rumors of financial difficulties at the company, and advised his clients to "stallany additional movement till they brief me next Monday" (italics his). Without recounting the resulting shit storm (Which you can read about here and here), I would like to pass censure on the (purported) use of crowdsourcing to determine whether Forrester should give Owyang the ax. Basically, a social media consultant asked his readers to vote on Owyang's fate. A) This is only crowdsourcing if Forrester were to base a decision on it (which they surely won't); B) it gives form to the sort of anonymous trollery that all is social media's least attractive feature.

Crowdsourcing CongressI've been ignoring the rise of crowdsourcing in governance for the excellent reason that I'd have to drop my day job in order to due the subject justice. But that doesn't mean I've been lurking. Guest blogging at O'Reilly, Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose brought Gov 2.0
one step closer to fruition by asking the crowd how Congressional Websites might best take advantage of, well, crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing RecyclingBrilliant, common-sense use of community to disseminate recession-era home ec.

Army of ... Many?Tantalizing, right? Tune in later when I actually have time to complete a friggin' blog post.

Comments

Jeff,

You are absolutely right to pass censure on the (purported) use of crowdsourcing to determine whether Forrester should give Owyang the ax. Besides being yet another example of social media abuse, they didn't even think to limit the vote to one per person.

It's pretty easy to guess where angry Mzinga employees will be doing for days.

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